Underscore's Scala books are now open source

http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2017/05/29/why-we-open-sourced-our-books.html

by noelwelsh • 9 years ago

242 34 9 years ago

underscore.io

marvindanig• 9 years ago

Are these books also available as single page HTMLs?

meras• 9 years ago

yes, they are

noelwelsh8• 9 years ago

What meras said. PDF, single page HTML, and ePUB are the formats we provide.

absove• 9 years ago

I'm curious how up to date those books are with the latest version of Play/Slick, given how fast conventions move in those projects. The Play book seems to be from 2015, that sounds quite outdated.

noelwelsh8• 9 years ago

Play is the only book that is not up-to-date. Essential Slick is up-to-date with the latest version of Slick, Advanced Scala is up-to-date with the latest version of Cats, etc.

davegurnell• 9 years ago

I'm the author of the Play book. On the subject of that book...

There are only two significant things that are out of date. A minor tweak in the JSON library and the new DI system. The former is an easy fix. The latter will require a new chapter. I'm happy to chat to anyone who is interested in collaborating on these parts.

Trufa• 9 years ago

I don't have any use for the foreseeable future but I congratulate the effort and the contribution!

iamalchemist• 9 years ago

Congratulations for the effort and contribution!

noelwelsh8• 9 years ago

Thank you! Hope you enjoy the books :)

shanavasm• 9 years ago

Thanks a lot :)

codedevgoo• 9 years ago

I think giving away the books for free is good. However I just had a look and the courses ain't cheap. A good way to generate customers huh? The way I read your post it seemed that you guys were broke and needed a donation.

Hey if I got that wrong sorry in advance.

noelwelsh8• 9 years ago

"broke and needed a donation" --> This is not the case, and we wouldn't open source the books if we wanted to make more money. I could talk more about this, as I think the business angle is interesting and on topic for HN, but I'm at a conference right now.

noelwelsh8• 9 years ago

Tiny update on this. So far today 3808 books have been downloaded and about $81 in donations have been made. In a normal day we'd sell less 4 or 5 books and make between $100 and $200.

scalakotlinwar• 9 years ago

Scala kotlin war?

_pmf_2• 9 years ago

I think one can live with Kotlin. Scala is too obtuse and Clojure is just bad and pays a heavy performance penalty when interacting with Java due to internal usage of reflection if no type hints are used.

The only thing I'm missing in Kotlin are some metaprogramming facilities.

tasuki• 9 years ago

I'll bite: in what way is Scala obtuse?

raspasov• 9 years ago

Scala "is too obtuse".

Clojure "is just bad".

Kotlin "one can live with".

Hmm... Lol

stewbrew• 9 years ago

It's pretty lame to create a fake profile just to post a lame troll post.

lol768• 9 years ago

Is there a direct link to built PDFs somewhere, or do we have to go through the whole process of signing up to Gumroad and having the PDF emailed to us?

noelwelsh8• 9 years ago

Not yet. At some point we'll just host them our website but we haven't had time to do that. You can use a fake email to sign up to Gumroad if you want. Otherwise you can build the books yourself, which just requires Docker and a few hours to download the massive Latex Docker image.

ktta• 9 years ago

I'm happy to report that using junk but plausible email address works. It doesn't ask for anything other than the email once

webserg• 9 years ago

thanks, it is just in time for me, I'm looking for book about slick :)

JackFr• 9 years ago

A decent Slick book is desperately needed.

While the Slick documentation is accurate and nicely written it is really slim. I honestly think the paucity of documentation is holding back wider adoption.

smootoo• 9 years ago

As a sometime contributor to the slick project, I think the "Essential Slick" book, that is one of those that has been open-sourced here, does fill a gap in the documentation. I've recommended it in the past and now I can just link to it. Big thank you to Underscore for doing this.

It's an easy read with good examples that helps you get to grips with the concepts.

atemerev• 9 years ago

I have bought Type Astronaut's Guide to Shapeless, which is excellent. Can't wait to read the Cats book!

stephen1232• 9 years ago

They should redirect to https if they are accepting payment / donations.

I've got the shapeless book and found it really good. Keen to read the Cats one now. Does anyone know where you can get a hard copy. ?

noelwelsh8• 9 years ago

No hard copies yet for the Cats book---it isn't quite finished. When it is finished we'll look at creating hard copy. If you sign up with a real email address you'll get updates.

As for https---that's something we'll have to look into. Not sure what the situation is but I thought the Gumroad popup was over https.

stephen1232• 9 years ago

Ok, thanks Noel.

Oh I see, the popup is https...

kkanojia• 9 years ago

This is awesome. Thanks guys!

noelwelsh8• 9 years ago

It's great to hear it's useful!

daddykotex• 9 years ago

Seriously, big thanks to Underscore for this. The Type Astronaut's Guide to Shapeless is amazing and I'd recommend it to anyone who is an intermediate Scala developer that wants to step up it's game.

Underscore's Scala books are now open source

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